Alligator Alcatraz Is Violence As Entertainment In America
Alligator Alcatraz Is Racial Violence As Entertainment In America
A prison—no, a concentration camp—squats in the middle of the Florida Everglades, slick with humidity and menace. Its perimeter is crawling with coiling pythons, prowling alligators, and water thick like swamp stew. But the only sign greeting visitors is deceptively simple, a bright blue highway placard that reads, almost cheerfully, “Alligator Alcatraz.”
There’s no cartoon maw or dripping blood on the metal, just the casual normalcy of bureaucracy naming a torture site like it’s an amusement park. And that’s the horror: the banality. The glossy sign is the perfect backdrop for smiling tourists who want proof they visited America’s latest monument to racial cruelty.
Inside, immigrants, people seeking safety, work, and survival, are held behind razor wire and electric fencing as they are “processed” far from the eyes of the public. A remote island encircled by water and teeth, by policy and cruelty. A place designed to be inescapable, to make suffering invisible, or worse, entertaining.
Outside, white tourists stand grinning for selfies. Parents hoist toddlers onto their hips and beam in front of the sign. Vendors hawk T-shirts, hats, and beverage coolers. A Florida GOP online store announces: “Grab our merch to support tough-on-crime borders! Limited supply—get yours before the gators do!” Artists have generated grotesque memes and cartoons of brown migrants being devoured by cartoon alligators with ICE badges and sell them as collectibles. This isn’t just a prison. It’s a theme park of cruelty.
Most of the coverage about Alligator Alcatraz has stopped at calling it “tasteless” or “offensive” or criticizes it as cheap political theater. They treat the tourists as crass, clueless, or simply insensitive. That framing is too polite. It sanitizes what’s actually happening. These people are re-enacting a ritual of racial cruelty that’s centuries old.
Let’s keep it 100: this ain’t new.
White racists have always turned torture into spectacle and profit. They’ve been doing it for millennia. Their ancestors picnicked, drank, danced, made love, breastfed, and peddled wares at public executions in Europe. They pressed close to watch bodies twist at the gallows, collected flayed skin to bind books and shoes, and boiled heads to display in cabinets. They paid to drink the blood of guillotined prisoners as medicine and good luck.
This wasn’t just depravity for its own sake. It shaped them. Exposure to so much cruelty and sadism didn’t make them more civilized; it primed them to become colonizers, enslavers, and mass killers. It trained generations to see violence as normal, to see other human beings as resources to be consumed or destroyed. This was the apprenticeship for empire. All that moral rot taught them to conquer, cage, and kill without shame and with joy.
They did not stop when they got to America, where they transported their sadism. White folks gathered in large crowds for lynchings like it was Sunday service, brought their children along to watch Black adults and children be tortured and roasted alive in town squares. They carved off ears, fingers, teeth, and genitals to sell or keep as heirlooms. They posed for photos beside charred corpses and turned them into postcards they mailed to family and friends.
And Florida has its own signature contribution to this culture of ghoulishness: the “alligator bait” postcards of the early 20th century. Sold to tourists. Collected as jokes. These showed Black children as “dainty morsels” for alligators’ open mouths, literal bait and prey. The message was unmistakable: Black life was disposable, consumable. Children were not human, but food for the swamp.
This isn’t ancient history. It’s not just about postcards from a century ago. The appetite for Black and brown suffering is alive and documented in our own lifetimes. For example, when Ahmaud Arbery was murdered in 2020, the killer’s sister took a photo of his blood-soaked body and posted it to Snapchat like a hunting trophy. Five years earlier in St. Louis, a museum exhibit displayed photos of Mike Brown’s dead body without his family’s permission, turning Black death into educational spectacle for paying visitors.
What we’re witnessing in the Florida swamps isn’t some new, aberrant cruelty. It’s the same appetite their ancestors cultivated at the gallows and the lynching tree. It’s the same impulse that made them collect body parts as trophies and mail postcards of charred corpses. That reflex to turn death into spectacle and keepsake was never buried.
That’s why these tourists smiling at Alligator Alcatraz matters. They’re not outliers or curiosities. They’re participants in an unbroken lineage. They’re proving the inheritance is alive. That the instinct to commodify cruelty didn’t die with their lynching ancestors; it simply adapted to new backdrops, new media formats, new destinations. These racists don’t see human beings trapped on that island. They see a chance to make memories. They don’t see a prison. They see a souvenir stand. And in that moment, they’re not just tourists. They’re colonizers. They’re lynchers. They’re ghouls — the descendants of those who came before them, and they are proud to keep the ritual going.
That lineage is not accidental. It is alive in every angle of this new spectacle.
Look at the new “Alligator Alcatraz” propaganda cartoon, which shows ICE corralling brown immigrants into an alligator’s jaws. A shark laughs at them. A bird gives ICE a thumbs-up. It’s supposed to be funny. Just like the old postcards were supposed to be funny. It’s “humor” that dehumanizes. Laughing while reinforcing the message that brown bodies are animals to be trapped, devoured, and erased.
Because that’s how propaganda works. Dehumanize them so you can cage them. Make them animals so you can banish them to islands ringed with predators. Make it funny so the cruelty feels normal. And the tourists get to be part of the fun of commodifying horror and participating in cruelty with a grin and a filter.
We shouldn’t be surprised. This is exactly who America is. This is exactly who Florida is selling this to. We’re not just watching history repeat itself. We’re living among the proud descendants of lynchers, colonizers, and ghouls who have always found entertainment and profit in other people’s dehumanization and suffering.
These people are ghouls. That word isn’t metaphorical. A ghoul is someone who feeds on the dead, who finds pleasure in decay, who’s drawn to corpses and suffering. Their ancestors were literally that: pawing through remains at executions in Europe, cutting off ears and fingers at lynchings in America, preserving body parts as keepsakes. They made children watch. They taught them not just to accept cruelty but to delight in it. Today’s tourists at Alligator Alcatraz aren’t just indifferent to suffering; they’re drawn to it. They show up with cameras to consume it. They want to prove they were there, to savor the horror without the shame.
These tourists’ presence at this prison isn’t some harmless curiosity or accidental road-trip detour. It’s proof of racial inheritance. Because only a culture of people descended from colonizers, lynchers, and ghouls would see a prison deliberately built on an island crawling with alligators and pythons and think photo op.
When they stand there grinning in front of Alligator Alcatraz, they’re not sightseeing. They’re re-enacting the family ritual and racial heritage. This is intergenerational violence made mundane. It’s proof that white supremacy isn’t an artifact of the past but a living, breathing inheritance.
It’s not history repeating itself by accident. It’s descendants upholding a sadistic tradition with a camera in hand. See these people clearly. Don’t pretend they’re harmless tourists. Don’t give them the grace of assuming ignorance. Name them for what they are: inheritors of a tradition of racist cruelty, descendants of people who found joy in our suffering. When they smile in front of that blue sign, they’re announcing their allegiance and commitment to upholding white supremacy.
Believe them.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.
SEE ALSO:
Florida Begins Construction Of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Migrant Facility
Alligator Alcatraz Is Racial Violence As Entertainment In America was originally published on newsone.com
